Professor Steven Smith: Last time, I ended by talking
about Machiavelli as both a revolutionary in many ways and a
reformer of the moral vocabulary about virtue and vice,
good and evil. Machiavelli seeks to replace,
to transpose an older vocabulary associated both with
Plato and certainly, perhaps more importantly,
with biblical sources, wants to transform altogether
the language of virtue, to give it a new kind of
meaning, to change it from either Platonic or Christian
otherworldliness to a greater sense of worldly power.
Virtue is, for him, or to use his term again,
virtù is related with manliness, with force,
with power. He tells us,
in chapter 25 of The Prince, the ethic of the
prince must be one of audacity and even more audacity and that
famous and very volatile image he uses,
fortune is a woman and you must know how- the prince must know
how to conquer the woman, must be used through policies
of force, brutality, audacity.
This is the language of Machiavelli.
Virtue is associated with the quest for worldly glory,
with ambition, with the desire to achieve
success, and that's what I want to talk
about at greater length today.
I want to talk about what in the political and philosophical
literature about this is called the problem of "dirty hands."
And if you want to join the political game,
you must be prepared to get your hands dirty,
and what Machiavelli means by that, how he comes to this
problem. In order, he argues,
to effect a transformation of European morality,
it is, in other words,
to teach the prince, as he says in chapter 15,
how not to be good, you have to go to the source of
the morality. You have to go to the source of
morality. To affect the maxims,
to affect the standards that govern our lives,
it is necessary to go to the source of those standards and
those maxims and that can only be found in religion.
Oddly, it seems in some ways, religion does not seem to be a
major theme of The Prince.
In a memorable passage from chapter 18, Machiavelli advises
the prince always to cultivate the appearance of religion.
The prince, he writes, should appear all mercy,
all faith, all honesty, all humanity and all religion,
he writes, adding nothing is more necessary to appear to have
this last quality.
The point is clear.
The appearance of religion, by which he clearly means
Christianity, is good while the actual
practice of it is harmful.
Think about the way in which that transforms what Plato says
about justice in his answer to Glaucon in Book II of the
Republic where…or Thrasymachus…where they both
say it is more important, is it not more important to
have the appearance of being just than the reality of it?
And here, you see Machiavelli in a way adding his voice to
that chorus. It is much better to have the
appearance than the reality of religion.
But in order to understand or to discover the core of
Machiavelli's teachings about religion,
I have to make a slight detour away from The Prince and
to his Discourses on Livy and in maybe the most important
chapter of that book, Book II, chapter 2,
called "Concerning the Kinds of People the Romans had to Fight
and how Obstinately they Defended their Freedom,"
a long title for a chapter to be sure, but here Machiavelli
develops a powerful contrast between two opposed and mutually
incompatible moral codes, the Christian and the pagan.
"If one asks oneself," Machiavelli writes,
"If one asks oneself how it came about that people of old,"
in olden--in the ancient world, "were more fond of liberty than
we are today, I think the answer," he says,
"is due to the same cause that makes men today less bold than
they used to be," less bold, "and this is due I
think to the difference between our education and that of bygone
days." So what precisely is the
difference that Machiavelli refers to here between our
education and the education of bygone days that makes people or
that made people in the ancient world more fond of liberty,
as he says, than those of our contemporaries or Machiavelli's
contemporaries? Machiavelli's emphasis here on
education, particularly moral and religious education,
is the key difference between the ancient times and his own.
These two different ages, he believes,
advanced two very different systems of moral and religious
education, one based on pagan worldliness
and the other based on Christian innocence.
And it is that conflict, as it were, between what we
might call worldliness and innocence that is the core of
Machiavelli's moral code.
Let me quote Machiavelli's passage from the
Discourses at some length because I think it's very
revealing: "Our religion," he writes, obviously thinking
of the Catholic Christianity of his time.
"Our religion," he writes, "has glorified humble and
contemplative men, monks, priests,
humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action.
It is assigned as man's highest good humility,
abnegation, and contempt for mundane things,"
whereas the other, that is to say the ancient
moral code, "whereas the other identified it with magnanimity,
bodily strength, and everything that conduces to
make men very bold.
And if our religion," he says, "demands that in you there be
strength what it asks for is the strength to suffer rather than
to do bold things."
In other words, he says Christian strength,
the strength of the Christian, is the strength to suffer,
thinking of Jesus on the Cross rather than to,
as he puts it, do bold things.
And it is not for Machiavelli simply the existence of these
two different moralities that is at stake.
By softening morals, he believes,
by making us gentler, Christianity has had some
deeply perverse effects upon politics, so he claims.
This pattern of life, Machiavelli continues,
appears to have made the world weak and to have handed it over
to the prey of the wicked.
This pattern of life, this pattern of education,
of moral education, introduced by the Bible and
scripture and Christianity, has made the world weak.
In other words, by teaching humility,
self-abnegation, purity of heart,
Christianity has made it difficult to develop qualities
necessary for the defense of political liberty.
Christianity has made the world weak or, if you want to use his
again highly charged word for that, it has made the world
effeminate.
Machiavelli would no doubt be taken up against some board of
offense today for using such a term but that's his language.
What can I say? This is why he concludes there
are fewer republics today than in the time of the ancients
because we do not have the same love of freedom that they did.
Now Machiavelli's explicit referencing of the ancient civil
religions, the ancient civil theology,
is a direct tribute to the role of Numa, N-u-m-a,
in Livy's famous History of the Roman Republic.
Justin, who is an authority on this text, can tell you more
about it if you like, but in the opening books of
Livy, he tells the story of how Rome was founded by Romulus,
who had murdered his brother, Remus, but after this it
required a second founding and the second founding was the work
of a man named Numa, who, Livy writes,
determined that Rome, which had originally been
established through force of arms,
should be reestablished through justice, laws and proper
observances, in other words, religion.
In order to complete the founding of the city,
it was necessary to establish its gods and ensure proper
respect for the law.
Numa was the bringer of the Roman legal codes respecting
religion, proper observances and the like.
But Machiavelli uses Livy and in the story about Rome's second
founding to bring home an important lesson about the
utility of religion.
"Religion," he tells the reader, "is not to be evaluated
by its truth content but for its consequences for society."
But the story of Numa or his use of that story tell us more
than just a lesson about the social utility of religion.
At the time of the founding of Rome, Machiavelli writes,
religion was necessary to temper and control the warlike
character of the Romans.
Religion had to bring a softening effect upon against
the violent and bestial character of the early Romans.
But for us today, Machiavelli writes,
religion has to serve the opposite purpose.
It must instill something of a fighting spirit into people who
have lost their instinct to resist encroachments on their
liberty. In many ways,
this is the deeper meaning of Machiavelli's slogan,
"one's own arms."
He uses in a variety of passages the formula that a good
republic depends upon one's own arms and laws and in a deeper
sense this idea of "one's own arms" means developing the
capacities to resist encroachments on your freedom.
The prince, in other words, has to use religion to
encourage his subjects to rely upon their own arms rather than
on divine promises and that again is the teaching of his
retelling of the story of David and Goliath,
the biblical story of David and Goliath, in chapter 13 of The
Prince. You remember how Machiavelli
retells and also rewrites that story.
He writes the story saying that David went armed,
went into battle with Goliath armed only,
he says, with a sling and a knife, and those of you who know
the story and checked against the biblical account of the
story know that David only went into battle against Goliath
armed with Saul's armor and his sling.
Machiavelli gives him a knife.
Where did this come from?
Why does he add this?
His subtle alteration of the biblical story is hugely
revealing. Its moral seems to be "trust in
God's promises, yes, but bring a knife just in
case."
It's like the old joke about the fighter who went in to the
ring and before going in to the ring and he asked the priest to
pray for him. He said, "I'll pray for him but
if he can punch it'll help."
In a small respect, that's Machiavelli.
Machiavelli sensed that his own country was deeply deficient in
these martial virtues, necessary to reassert greatness
and this was a theme of a lengthy poem he wrote.
Yes. You're surprised.
Yes, Machiavelli wrote poetry and plays.
His play, The Mandragola,
is still performed, but he wrote an interesting
poem, a lengthy poem called
Ambizione, ambition, something like
Platonic thumos, which lamented his countrymen's
lack of civic spirit and their need to be reeducated in the art
of war. I only want to read a small
section to you from that poem: "If you perchance are tempted
to accuse nature, if Italy, so wary and wounded,
does not produce hard and bellicose people,
this I say is not sufficient to erase our cowardice for
education can supplement where nature is deficient.
Stern education made Italy bloom in ancient days and made
her rise and conquer the entire world and for herself make room.
But now she lives, if tears can be called life,
beneath the ruins and unhappy fate that she has reaped from
her long lack of strife.
But now she lives, if tears can be called life,
beneath the ruins and unhappy fate that she has reaped from
her long lack of strife."
And just from this little section of the poem,
you can see that the theme of a new kind of education and only
that can remedy nature's defects,
as Machiavelli calls them.
It is this lack of strife, this long lack of strife,
that makes people weak.
People are weakened by prolonged peace and they are
made strong, fierce and independent through war.
Only by hardening themselves, he says, will it be possible
for Italy, as he puts it, "to rise and conquer the entire
world, in ancient days again and made her rise and conquer the
entire world and for herself make room."
His point seems to be this.
If you want liberty, you have to know how not to be
good, at least as Christianity has defined goodness.
The Christian virtue of humility, turning the other
cheek, forgiveness of sins, must be rejected if you want to
do good as opposed to just being good.
You have to learn, in other words,
how to get your hands dirty.
Between the innocence of the Christian and the worldliness of
Machiavelli's new morality, there can be no reconciliation.
These are just two incompatible moral positions that Machiavelli
states but he goes further than this.
The safety and security enjoyed by the innocents,
our freedom to live blameless lives and to have untroubled
sleep, depends upon the prince's
clear-eyed and even ruthless use of power.
The true statesman, the true prince for
Machiavelli, must be prepared to mix a love of the common good,
a love of his own people, with a streak of cruelty that
is often regarded as essential for a great ruler in general,
another part of knowing how not to be good, knowing when and how
to use cruelty or what Machiavelli tellingly calls
"cruelty well used."
When it's well used, it's a virtue.
This is simply another example of how moral goodness grows out
of and even requires a context of moral evil.
Machiavelli's advice to you is clear.
If you cannot accept the responsibilities of political
life, if you cannot afford to get your hands dirty,
if you cannot accept the harsh necessities that may require
cruelty, deceit and even murder, then get out of the way,
then this is not for you.
Don't seem to impose, don't seek to impose your own
high-minded innocence, sometimes called justice,
your own high-minded innocence on the requirements of
statecraft because it will only lead to ruin.
In the modern era, the presidency of Jimmy Carter,
for example, is usually taken as exhibit A
of the confusion between Christian humanitarianism and
the necessities of reason of state.
If you can't do the tough thing, if you can't do the harsh
thing, Machiavelli says, then stay out of politics and
don't attempt to impose your high-minded morality on the
state. As I said at the beginning,
in the philosophical literature, this has become
known as the problem of dirty hands so named after a famous
play written by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
The problem of dirty hands refers to the conflict of
duties, again conflict of moralities between the harsh
requirements of politics and the equally demanding desire for
moral purity, to keep the world at a distance.
Machiavelli doesn't deny that there is something deeply
admirable about the desire to remain morally pure,
morally decent, morally innocent,
but he just wants to say this is a very different morality
from the morality of politics.
In Sartre's play, the action takes place in a
fictional eastern European country during World War II,
probably something like Yugoslavia, where a communist
resistance fighter reproaches an idealistic young recruit to the
resistance who is resisting or is balking at the order to carry
out a political assassination.
"Why did you join us?"
the communist resistance fighter asks.
"Purity is an idea for the yogi or the monk.
Do you think anyone can govern innocently?"
"Do you think anyone can govern innocently," the phrase taken of
course from Saint-Just, one of the leaders of the
Jacobin Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
What do you think politics is, a game of moral purity?
The same kind of conflict is really very much at the core of
the great political fiction of John le Carre,
the great novelist of the Cold War and so on,
and in his great, one of his early political
thrillers, a book called The Spy who
Came in from the Cold, he depicts there a British
agent who was working undercover and who at the same time is
carrying on a love affair with an idealistic young English
librarian who has joined the communist party.
In this case, she, the communist,
is the idealistic one.
She's joined the party because she believes it will aid the
cause of nuclear disarmament and will bring international peace
and when Lemas, the spy, reveals to her that he
is a spy, he tells her his view of what politics is,
the nature of politics.
"There's only one law in the game," Lemas says,
"the expediency of temporary alliances.
Who do you think spies are, priests, saints,
martyrs? They're squalid little men,
fools, queers, sadists, drunkards,
people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten
lives. Do you think they sit like
monks weighing up right and wrong?"
So both of these cases, the Sartre case,
the John le Carre case, in a way are interesting but
they're also sort of cases of what I think of as faux
Machiavellianism, kind of intellectuals engaging
in tough talk to show that they have really lost their
innocence, which is the sort of
intellectual equivalent of losing your virginity,
showing you're not really innocent about the world.
Machiavelli of course likes to play that game and it suggests
that the world is divided between the weak and the strong,
between the realists who see things the way they are and the
idealists who require the comfort of moral illusions.
Yes, Machiavelli sometimes seems to corroborate this point
of view. Does he not say that armed
prophets always win, the unarmed prophets lose?
Did he not say that he wrote to reveal the effectual truth of
things and not just what people have imagined the case to be?
Yet it seems inconceivable that Machiavelli wrote an entire book
simply to prove the obvious, that is to say that the strong
will always crush the weak and that politics is left to those
who leave their scruples at the door.
The question is, was Machiavelli really that
kind of Machiavellian?
Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian?
Let's see.
What kind of government did Machiavelli think best?
As he indicates at the beginning of The Prince,
there are two kinds of regimes: there are principalities and
republics. But each of these regimes,
he says, is based on certain contrasting dispositions or what
he calls humors, umori,
humors. "In every society," he writes,
this is chapter 9 of The Prince, "two diverse humors
are found from which this arise, that the people desire neither
to be commanded nor oppressed by the great and the great desire
to command and oppress the people."
These are the two great political psychological
dispositions, the popular desire not to be
oppressed and the disposition of what he calls the great to
command and oppress.
Machiavelli uses these two psychological and even in some
ways quasi-medical terms, humors, to designate two
classes of people on which every society is based.
His theory of the humors in chapter 9 seems in some ways to
be reminiscent of Plato's account of the three classes of
the soul or the three parts of the soul with one vivid
exception. "Each class of the city," he
says, "is bound or determined by a humor but neither humor is
anchored in reason or rationality."
Every state is divided into two classes expressing these two
qualities, these two psychological qualities,
the grandi, the rich and powerful who wish
to dominate, and the popolo,
the common people who wish merely to be left alone,
who wish neither to rule nor be ruled.
Now, one might expect that the author of a book entitled The
Prince would favor the great,
would favor the grandi, those who desire to rule.
Are not these aristocratic goals of honor and glory
precisely what Machiavelli seems to be advocating?
Yet in many ways, Machiavelli proceeds to
deprecate the virtues of the nobility, perhaps to our
surprise. The ends of the people,
the ends, the purposes of the people, is more decent than that
of the great since the great want to oppress and the people
want not to be oppressed, he says.
His advice is that the prince should seek to build his power
base on the people rather than on the nobles.
Because of their ambition for power, the nobles will always be
a threat to the prince and, in an interesting reversal of
the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of politics,
it is the nobles here who are said to be the more fickle and
unpredictable and the people are more constant and reliable.
Remember in the Platonic and Aristotelian view of politics
the democracy, the rule of the people,
the demos, was always criticized for it
being fickle and unstable and subject to whim and passion and
so on. Here, Machiavelli tells us it
is the great who are subject to this kind of inconstancy and the
people are more reliable.
The worst, he writes, that a prince can expect from a
hostile people is to be abandoned by them but from the
great, when they are hostile,
he must fear not only being abandoned but also that they may
move against him.
The grandi are more dangerous and fickle.
So the main business of government consists in knowing
how to control the elites because they are always a
potential source of conflict and ambition.
The prince must know how to chasten the ambition,
to humble the pride, as it were,
of the great and powerful, and this, we will see as early
as Wednesday, becomes a major theme in the
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, humbling or chastening the
pride of the few.
The rule of the prince or sovereign requires the ability
to control the ambition and to do so through selective policies
of executions, of public accusations and
political trials.
Remember the example that we read at the end of class on
Friday, I believe from chapter 7,
the example of Cesare Borgia and Remirro d'Orco and how his
execution, his bloody execution, left the people,
Machiavelli says, stupefied and satisfied?
Here is a perfect example of how to control the ambitions of
the nobles and to win the people to your side.
So Machiavelli's prince, while not exactly a democrat,
recognizes the essential decency of the people and the
need to keep their faith.
And by decency he seems to mean their absence of ambition,
the absence of the desire to dominate and control.
But this kind of decency is not the same as goodness for there
is also a tendency on the part of the people to descend into
what Machiavelli calls idleness or license.
The desire not to oppress others may be decent but at the
same time the people have to be taught or educated how to defend
their liberty. Fifteen hundred years of
Christianity, he says, have left people weak,
have left the people weak without their capacities to
exercise political responsibility and the resources
to defend themselves from attack.
So just as princes must know how to control the ambitions of
the multitude, how to control the ambitions of
the nobles--excuse me--they, the princes,
must know how to strengthen the desires of the common people.
Some readers of The Prince, even some very
astute readers of The Prince,
have thought that Machiavelli's work is really,
or Machiavelli's prince, is really a kind of democrat in
disguise and that the prince is intended precisely to alert the
people to the dangers of a usurpatory prince.
This is for example what the great seventeenth-century
political philosopher Spinoza believed about Machiavelli.
In his book called, simply called,
The Political Treatise, Spinoza wrote:
"Machiavelli wished to show how careful a people should be
before entrusting its welfare to a single prince.
I am led," Spinoza continues, "to this opinion concerning
that most far-seeing man because it is known that he was
favorable to liberty."
That's Spinoza on Machiavelli, because "he was favorable to
liberty" and that the book, he says, is kind of a satire on
princely rule. Or, if you don't believe
Spinoza, if you don't believe his authority is sufficient,
consider someone who you'll be reading in a couple of weeks,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from the Social Contract.
"Machiavelli was an honorable man and a good citizen,"
Rousseau says, "an honorable man and a good
citizen who, being attached to the House of
Medici, was forced, during the oppression of his
homeland, to disguise his love of
freedom." So, The Prince was
written in a way that disguised the real teaching of the book,
which is the love of freedom and presumably the freedom of
the people, something of the type that Rousseau himself spoke
about.
Maybe these comments go too far.
Maybe they are exaggerations and I think to some degree they
are but it's revealing that both of these very serious readers of
Machiavelli took him to be an apostle of freedom.
Spinoza taking him, taking his book to be a warning
to the people about the dangers of princely rule,
Rousseau believing that he had deliberately disguised his love
of freedom because he had to appeal to the tyrannical nature
of the Medici family.
In either case, they regard him as
surreptitiously taking the side of the people against the
nobles.
In any case, whatever one makes of those
examples, Machiavelli seems to be challenging important aspects
of the classical conceptions that we've been talking about up
to this point. In the classical republic,
for the ancient republic of Plato and Aristotle,
these republics were ruled by nobilities,
gentlemen possessed of wealth and leisure, who were therefore
capable of forming sound political judgment,
who will dominate, while in Machiavelli's state it
is the people who are going to be the dominant social and
political power. Machiavelli wants to redirect
power to some degree away from the nobles and toward the
people. One wants to know why,
why does he want to do that?
In the first place, he judges the people to be more
reliable, as he tells us, than the great.
Once the people have been taught to value their liberty,
have learned to oppose encroachments on their freedom,
to be fierce and vigilant watchdogs rather than humble and
subservient underlings, they will serve as a reliable
basis for the greatness and power of a state.
With the people on his side, the prince is more likely to
achieve his goals of a robust civil life for his people and
eternal glory for himself.
And, as Machiavelli likes to say, the prince must know how to
adapt to the times.
What is true for princes is no less true for advisers to
princes like Machiavelli himself.
One must know the times and character of a people.
In the ancient republic, it may have been necessary to
find and impose restraints on the passions of the demos but in
the modern world, he says, where republics have
become a thing of the past, the people need to be taught
how to value their liberty above all else.
The most excellent princes of the past were those like Moses,
he tells us, who brought tables of law and
prepared people for self-government.
It is fitting and proper that The Prince concludes,
the last chapter, chapter 26, concludes with a
patriotic call to his countrymen to emancipate themselves and
liberate Italy from foreign invaders.
So what did Machiavelli achieve?
What were his actual accomplishments?
Did he accomplish all he set out to do, to rewrite or to
write a new moral code for political life,
to found a new political continent, as he speaks about,
to found new modes and orders along the lines of Columbus?
Did he achieve this?
First of all, one should not and cannot
underestimate his unprecedented break with both classical and
biblical antiquity.
More than anyone else before him, and perhaps more than
anyone else since, he sought to liberate politics
from ecclesiastical control.
The new prince, as we've seen,
must know how to use religion but needs to learn how not to be
used by religion, must not become a dupe of the
religious. He must know how to use
religious passions and sentiments but not be used by
them. Politics must become a purely
worldly affair. It should not be limited or
constrained by any transcendent standards or moral laws that do
not derive from politics itself, whether a law of God or some
kind of transcendent moral order or code.
Machiavelli's warning, we might say today,
to the religious right, or his critique of the
religious right, cannot make politics conform to
transcendent moral law.
But not only did Machiavelli bring a new worldliness to
politics, he also introduced a new kind of populism,
you might say. Plato and Aristotle imagined
aristocratic republics that would invest power in an
aristocracy of education and virtue.
Machiavelli deliberately seeks to enlist the power of the
people against aristocracies of education and virtue.
He is a kind of proto-democrat almost who sought to re-create,
not through accident and chance,
but through planning and design a new kind of republic in the
modern world. The republic that Machiavelli
imagined, and it's interesting while he tells us he's only
going to the effectual truth of things and not the imagination
of it, nevertheless Machiavelli does
himself imagine a new kind of regime, a new kind of republic
in the modern world that would not be a city at peace but would
be a city at war.
It would be armed and expansive.
Machiavelli's republic feeds on conflict, on war and conquest.
It is aggressive and imperialistic.
Does it sound familiar?
Is it us? In fact, if you look at a
brilliant article I think in this week's New Republic
by Robert Kagan called "Cowboy Nation,"
Kagan demonstrates I think with a great deal of conviction that
the American republic from its onset has been expansive,
aggressive, imperialistic, from the conquest of the
territories, the expropriation of the native Americans,
the acquisition of Louisiana, wars of liberation against
Mexico and Spain and so on, well into the twentieth and now
the twenty first century, an aggressive,
expansive, imperialistic republic.
That, he says, has been our history and what
it should say, what it doesn't quite say I
think, is that it has been this
history not because it is American but because it is a
republic, because of its regime type,
its regime character.
That kind of behavior seems perhaps to be built in to the
natures of republic.
It was Machiavelli's admiration for the politics,
what someone once called the lupine politics,
the wolf-like politics, of republican Rome that led him
to understand that all social and moral goods have been
established by morally questionable means.
Have we become or have we always been Machiavelli's
republic, Machiavelli's desire?
Think about that when you're in your sections or writing your
papers and you will get those paper topics on Wednesday,
by the way. And finally,
Machiavelli is the author of a new amoral realism.
"By whatever means necessary" I think is his motto or should be
his motto, "by whatever means necessary,"
and oddly he claims to be merely stating out loud,
merely stating aloud what all writers have known all along.
It is necessary, he says, for the prince to know
well how to use the beast and the man, he writes.
"This role," he says, "was taught covertly by ancient
writers. It was taught covertly by
ancient writers," he says in chapter 18.
The idea then that Machiavelli is doing no more than saying
openly and overtly what ancient writers had wrapped in parable
and enigma and myth says something about Machiavelli's
new political science.
What was previously taught only subtly and in private will now
be taught openly and in public.
What was once available only to a few, will now be available to
all. Perhaps more than anything
else, Machiavelli's new openness, his readiness to
challenge received authority, and his willingness to consider
authority as self-created, as self-made rather than
bestowed by either nature or grace,
is what fundamentally constitutes his modernity.
So I'm going to leave it on that note and on Wednesday we
will begin the study of one of Machiavelli's greatest and most
profound disciples in the modern world,
a man by the name of Thomas Hobbes.